“‘One heritage; one future; one city. Two sectors.’ Building International Literary Communities in 1960’s Berlin (East and West)”
8 July
Presented in Part 1 of the Panel “Constructing ‘Worlds of Literature'”, moderated by Bart Soethaert. 14:30 – 16:00 (Berlin time).
After the building of the Wall, an intensive phase of cultural rearmament began in both parts of the city. In West Berlin, a number of measures were designed to bring leading representatives of international modernism and the avant-garde as well as promising young artists to the city: among others through reading series, the founding of the Literary Colloquium and an Artists in Residence Program. These activities served the declared purpose to internationalize the German literary community, to re-establish West-Berlin as a cultural metropolis – and thus to increase the importance of the insular city. In return, the East Berlin authorities actively sought to create an international literary community mirroring and surpassing that of the West. The GDR writers’ union, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs made serious efforts to intensify international contacts; friendship agreements with writers’ unions in socialist sister states were concluded, international writers’ meetings and art festivals were organized. However, bringing international writers to East Berlin answered different purposes: it mainly aimed at enhancing the world-wide prestige of socialist German literature and at building a socialist literary community as opposed to western capitalist communities. The paper will examine the international literary traffic and transactions in Berlin in the 1960s, the competing communities as well as the different notions of world literature that were involved in this cultural Cold War.
Introduction by Bart Soethaert, Postdoctoral Researcher RA 5 “Building Digital Communities”
Jutta Müller-Tamm is Professor of German Literature (19th century to the present) at Freie Universität Berlin and Director of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies. Her research interests include the relationship between literature and the sciences, the history of the humanities, and contemporary literature. Recent publications: Schreiben als Ereignis. Künste und Kulturen der Schrift (co-ed., Fink 2018); Alexander von Humboldt. Sämtliche Schriften. Bd. 6: 1840–1849 (co-ed., dtv 2019); Poetic Critique. Encounters with Art and Literature. (co-ed., DeGruyter 2021). Her current research project focuses on Berlin as international literary metropolis since the 1960s.
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